Cities of Refuge (44 page)

Which she was, she supposed.

One evening she was downtown walking west into a sun bowing down and came upon a movie lineup wrapping around a corner for a block and a half as hundreds spilled out from the early show, some of them mulling under the marquee, forcing others into the traffic, and the cars patiently waiting, and from
her vantage across the street she saw the teeming shape, the massing and the long tail, and in the high murmuring heard her name called from somewhere. Even from a slight distance she couldn’t see far past the edges, over the heads. She turned, turned away really, and looked through the open windows of a restaurant where her attention was caught by a young woman alone at a table, not ten feet from the street but seemingly miles from the throng, flat-boned, Russian-looking, staring at her glass of wine, lost there, and Kim saw her, this woman she didn’t know, as someone’s daughter. Then her name, called again, and she almost walked away, a part of her wanted away, but instead she drifted across the street and into the crowd and again her name on the air – it was Harold calling her and she thought she would cry but she didn’t – and then she stopped hearing it and the moment it hit her that he was gone a hand fell on her shoulder and she turned to see a man she knew, she knew him well, though the how and who escaped her, and he said he’d been thinking about her because something had opened up and he wondered if she needed work.

And like that it all came back, his name, the day of the week, the place she was, what she needed. And she thought that she’d been wrong, that she’d just missed it when it happened this way, that a divinity or whatever came to her upon seeming accidents like this, in the play of chance on a noisy city street in the fall. Maybe it was less than god, but it was more than luck. It was certainly mystery, a small, conferred radiance. Because the city gives you this, too. One day it tries to kill you and another it finds you and hauls you clear and gives you something not entirely rational to believe in. Like that healing mysteries didn’t fall on you but rose up, drawn forth simply by your paying attention to the lives
of others. That you had anything to do with it, this feeling, these mysteries, was one of those illusions that worked, that served, so necessary that it had force, and so became real.

The man – his name was Ryland something, Ryland Coombs – he knew a woman in Central America who was looking for someone like Kim, a writer and speaker of languages, to help with the work she’d be starting in January. It was a chance to be a part of an international team. He said, “Think about it.” And so at home that night she thought of the mountains and cities to the far south, and when she began whispering in her thoughts the names of those in need, she was the nine-year-old converted for the winter by the maid in Mexico City – yes, she remembered it now, that city, a lost place that had been returned to her – the maid who’d told her of miracles, and now as then she brought her hands together, palm to palm, as if still holding what had already escaped her grasp.

O
n what Marian felt would be her last good day, a dark young woman appeared at the door, holding a crimson and yellow shoulder bag. She was about to be canvassed or solicited, and she waited for the girl to see that she was in no shape for petitioning.

“Hello. I’m Teresa.”

“No, thank you, dear.”

“You’re Marian, yes?”

She’d forgotten the arrangement. She had no head for arrangements lately. Even when she had had one, she’d learned to reject the whole idea of them.

She and Teresa took tea on the back deck, waiting for Kim to show. The sky was clear but not deep. The blue that greeted the eye was not the blue of years past, but the dimming was not hers, she felt. It was cool so they shifted their chairs into the sun and without being asked to or making a fuss about it, Teresa tucked the blanket behind Marian to cover the small of her back. The girl talked easily but not too much. Upon only two questions she explained that she’d met Kim through a mutual friend, her former lawyer (this would be Kim’s Greg, though that was already “half-ended,” Kim had said). She said openly that she was in the country illegally and hoped to stay here and “make a life.” The arrangement, as Marian now recalled, had Teresa here on weekday afternoons, while Kim worked her part-time job, proofing copy at the
CBC
. In cash terms there’d be no net gain to the household, but Kim needed the time away from her, though she wouldn’t say so. And this Teresa needed the money.

The girl wore a thin tunic that looked as if it were stitched out of decorative tea towels. There was a name for it Marian might once have known.

“What has Kim told you about me?” The young woman hesitated. “I know she’s told you I’m sick, but do you know exactly what the work will involve?”

“I know, yes.”

“Have you done this before?”

“Yes. I looked after my mother.”

“Was she dying?”

“Yes.”

“Well. So you know what’s ahead of us.”

When the phone rang Teresa asked if she could answer. The question confused Marian and she didn’t respond and Teresa
went inside and took the call. It was just that it was backwards, the guest answering the phone. Marian had to remind herself that she wasn’t a host.

Teresa brought her the phone. Kim said she was sorry, that she’d be late. She was still waiting to see Harold’s estate lawyer.

“Why is he always running late?”

“I’m spending my life in this waiting room, just me and the expired magazines. I can tell you a lot about burrowing owls. Do you like Teresa? Say ‘Tuesday’ if you do.”

“I Tuesday very much.”

“Good. I think she’s wonderful.”

When she ended the call Marian looked at the phone receiver. She ran her finger lightly over the number pad, as if her touch could hold there and surprise her daughter some day in the future when Kim was ordering Thai or phoning a plumber. Kim called again half an hour later to say she had to go straight to work, and Marian and Teresa moved to the living room and began to tidy, though this was not part of the arrangement. Teresa said it was all the same work, and she liked doing it, and so they went over the method for dealing with Donald’s papers. Marian lay on the couch and explained that they were never to be stacked together. The ones on the coffee table were to be moved to his desk in the study, all others to the shelf inside the hutch. When Teresa took the pages from the mantel a stray condolence card fell to the floor. Marian asked for it. It was from Rosa and Tom, the Lams, old acquaintances from Montreal whom they hadn’t seen since Kim was six. They’d heard the news and were very sorry for her loss. Of course they’d heard the news. It travelled even among far-off strangers. Professor Found Dead in Ditch had become Professor Likely Struck by
Train had become Fallen from Train had become High Alcohol Levels in Professor Found Dead by Tracks. Professor’s Death Ruled Drunken Mishap.

She handed Teresa the card and said garbage.

“My first husband was a sad fool.”

She’d known it always, but knew it differently now. The circumstances of his death were ludicrous, clownish, a little slapstick, a man falling on his head at fifty miles an hour, but it was the fact of the death that cast a colder light on Harold, on all of them. All these years he’d worked like hell at the wrong things to keep his purchase and then Kim had been hurt and he started into the long slide. Or maybe it wasn’t so simple. Maybe he’d have lost purchase anyway.

It was not a mishap. His car had been left in a cemetery.

Teresa looked at her and then went into the kitchen, as if evading a question. It made her seem a part of the fractured family rather than a complete outsider. Maybe Teresa had heard how things had ended for Harold but so what. She’d never had to suffer him. Her connection was Kim. They were all connected through Kim. It should have made them lucky.

When she woke, Teresa was sitting across the room, reading a book.

“How long was I asleep?”

“Not long. What can I do?”

“What are you reading?”

The girl put it back in her bag, smiling. “A silly book. My sister sends some from home.”

“Can I see?”

She withdrew the book and handed it to Marian. A ratty paperback with an illustrated scene of jungle mountains. On a
dirt path crossing the foreground stood a young girl, looking off to the peaks.
El Viaje de Mariela
. The girl on the cover wore a necklace of a kind Marian had once bought somewhere in Central America or the Caribbean. She could picture herself leaving a courtyard with the necklace in hand. A first morning in a new city in the rain and when she left the market the sky had cleared and looming there was the volcano. Had the air been Spanish or Caribbean French? The necklace was jade.

They found it in a jewellery box in a basement dresser drawer. A black leather thong tied around a jade disk with a large round hole. She told Teresa to take it as a gift.

“To celebrate today, the day we met.”

The girl’s protests were sincere. She was going to feel bad about it, but Marian didn’t care.

“There’s no one else I’d rather give it to. Kim doesn’t wear jewellery and I don’t want it forgotten in a box. It’s to bring good fortune. Not luck but money. That design with the hole is from ancient coins. All the way back to China, I think.”

“I understand.”

“Now let’s see if I can get up these stairs.”

Though it took long enough coming up that she knew she wouldn’t go down again, she decided that rather than get into bed she’d just keep moving, out to the front porch. Teresa got the blanket and tucked her in and then let her be to sit alone there, looking off to the end of the street where Kim would appear in time. She traced back from the necklace to the memory of buying it. She didn’t like them, stray memories. They didn’t belong in her now. The dying animal turns from memory towards one short tapered thought. At the end of the thought is a shape that grows more certain as the animal closes. Marian
knew it was before her but couldn’t see it yet. She didn’t exactly fear it but now and then worried it would be something absurd. It would look to her like a half-dressed opera villain or a drunken town crier, or a shingled outhouse, something in wooden shoes. Harold’s death had been absurd. There was no way to think about it, account for it. Even the timing was comically bad, with everyone focused on her last weeks. Something had passed between Kim and Harold, she felt, but Kim hadn’t said what. His death was not a mishap, but neither could it have been chosen. He didn’t have to drive an hour to catch a train if he wanted to kill himself. And what he was doing on a freight train defied understanding. He was not the kind to go mad when he drank, so the madness of it must have already been in him. There was a thought – Harold had had an absurd ending in him from the outset, even before she’d met him all these years ago. Not that it was fated to claim him, but it lay dormant, and only by chance had something brought it to life.

She could only sit so long but she stayed. She wanted it to be Kim but Donald might be home first. He’d insist that she go inside and lie down, as if it mattered, because he was powerless and so needed to have things to insist upon. And she would have to put up a small resistance and then do as he asked. Their pretend negotiations. Back when, she’d learned to make love to him the same way.

This neighbourhood of porches. The jack-o’-lanterns were not far off. Then their crumpled November faces. She’d rather not have to see them. Strange kids appeared at the door each year. She’d lost track of the turnover on this street. In most of the houses were new families or the grown children of old ones. From the day they moved here there remained only the old
man named Betts, who’d outlived his wife and two children and went for a walk each warm day in his dressing gown, looking for anyone to hear his views on the royals or black people. And the family with the delinquent girl who had shouted the worst imaginable profanities at her parents all through her teens and now worked at a daycare. Across the street and a couple of yards over, a woman Marian had never spoken to was raking an early shedding of maple leaves in her front garden. She wore a wide-brimmed straw hat and every so often it would tilt up at passing cars or dogwalkers. Then a robin caught the woman’s attention, flying by, and she followed its path over to Marian’s yard and then saw her there and for the briefest moment paused, looking at her, then tilted the hat down again and went back to work. What had occupied her in that moment of apprehension? What thoughts or half thoughts? What doubts? Maybe she hadn’t known she was being watched. And now, what did she suppose Marian saw? What picture was she a part of? Could she imagine her way into the wasting woman on the porch? If the sky was closer in these last days, the made world, the human things, went on forever. Marian was aware. It was all composed before her, every facet, every line, ongoing, without frame, until it touched upon the other made world, creation, and there the wind moving in the tall trees, and the day being day, and the light on her own house, and the stranger inside it.